Heroes and monsters have reared their heads on
celluloid in every corner of the globe, either to conquer and corrupt or to defend wholesome peace. Others
grasp at a future they believe they have been
denied. Such were the tales of World War II-era
propaganda films and since their release,
they have been at turns examined, defended, and vilified by American and
British historians. Racism, sentiments of isolationism, political and social context, and developments in historical schools
of thought have worked to alter historical interpretations of this subject
matter. Four periods of historical study: 1960s postwar
Orthodox reactions to the violence and tension of the war-period, the
revisionist works of 1970s social historians, 1990s Postmodernism, and recent historical
scholarship focused on popular culture and memory- have all provided
significant input on WWII-era propaganda film studies. Each was affected by
previous historical ideologies and concurrent events to shape their final
products. Economic history, left-leaning liberal ideology, cultural discourse,
and women’s studies have also added additional insight into the scholarly interpretations of these
films.

There is no decisive historiography of WWII
propaganda studies and there is even less
organized work on the historical value of propaganda films. My research is
intended as a humble effort to examine the most prolific period of global
propaganda film production and how the academic world has remembered, revered,
and reviled it since. This historiographical work is not intended to be an
exhaustive review of every film or scholarly insight offered on the subject. I have restricted my research to the scholarly publications of American and British
historians and their interpretations of German, American, and British
propaganda films. As my bibliography indicates,
I began my
research by looking at WWII propaganda films from a global perspective, but the
scope of my research was narrowed in the interest of the limited
space afforded to an essay format. As a result, I
was able to devote greater attention to the reoccurring examinations of
specific films by scholars of different fields of thought. My earnest effort to capture the tumultuous
relationship between historical scholarship, media, and conflict is responsible
for the narrative I present here.

Current and past conflicts are a common catalyst
for propaganda. In 1942 the chairman of the Committee of Public Information,
George Creel, offered an exceedingly simple definition of propaganda: “the
fight for public opinion- as integral a part of any war machine as ships, guns,
and planes.”[1]
Modern definitions of propaganda are far more complex, a subject to which
entire monographs are devoted. Garth Jowett’s and Victoria O’Donnell’s Propaganda and Persuasion, the standard
for historical propaganda scholarship for over twenty-five years, has widened
the definition to include commercial advertisements, mass media, and
censorship. Jowett and O’Donnell have defined any form of communication that
attempts to disseminate or maintain an idea with the intent of shaping public
perceptions as propaganda.[2] During WWII, the American
government had a very similar understanding of propaganda and wielded control
over the popularly consumed feature film industry in all these regards.

The Office of War Information (OWI), which
managed the output of public media during WWII, devoted considerable attention
to the American film industry. The bureau sent representatives to evaluate
screenplays and to oversee plot-development meetings. They circulated manuals instructing filmmakers, directors
and publication companies on the patriotic responsibilities of the film
industry. In some instances, the agency would directly write dialogue for key
scenes or pressure a studio to censor films that did not promote the government’s
wartime ideologies. This level of involvement indicates the perceived value of film in reaching and influencing the masses.[3] Overseas, the British,
German, and Japanese governments were just as
actively engaged with their respective film entertainment industries. As
a result, WWII witnessed a greater production of propaganda films than its
predecessor, spanning newsreels, documentaries, and feature films in numbers
that some historians have argued outmatch any war before or after.[4] This wholesale commitment
of government funds and attention to the entertainment industry during a period
of intense warfare has since attracted academic inquiry by political science
scholars, students of media, and historians.

The Roots of Post-War
Historical Orthodoxy: Polarization and Political Divides

Any intellectual inquiry into propaganda film
historiography necessitates an understanding of American and British scholarship
before WWII. The horrors of the first global war had left an indelible mark upon
the human psyche and historians worked to root out what had gone awry in the
past. Many western scholars whose nations had opposed German eastern European
dominion began to shift their attitudes away from the World War I orthodoxy of the
early interwar period, which typified Germans and Austrians as the antagonists
of the war, to a more self-reflexive critique. [5] The American historian Sidney B. Fay, the author of one the most
significant contemporary texts on the origins of WWI , suggested that political
attitudes within historical scholarship were a source of inflamed tensions. In
the 1920s he proclaimed that certain ideas in the academic community during WWI
had been fueled “by a great deal of silly propaganda […] and that some day
documents would be published that would allow historians to arrive at a more
just estimate.”[6] The emphasis on blame in
war origin research, prominent among scholarship of this period, threatened to
obscure academic perceptions of the past and offered little more than a myopic
prediction about the catalysts for global warfare. Fay’s commentary, among others, suggests academia’s growing suspicions of
propaganda’s influence on historical objectivity, but this line of discourse
was subverted by the reemergence of war after Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Thoughout
the 1940s and 1950s, the propagated slogans, symbols, overtones, and attitudes
from previous decades returned to the Western world at large.[7] By
WWII’s end, orthodox historical writing witnessed
a temporary resurgence. The majority of post-war American and British
historians set the precedence of the WWII narrative by returning to the
traditional themes of history as a triumphal contest between the oppositional
forces of good and evil.

No figure in American and
British propaganda historiography would be demonized more easily than Dr.
Joesph Goebbels, German Reich Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment. Handpicked
by Adolf Hitler to lead Nazi propaganda film production, he was an attractive
source for propaganda scholarship by orthodox historians searching for
uncomplicated vilifications of Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war. Scholarship
representing a marked turn away from the more evenhanded work of the interwar
years flourished after the discovery Goebbels’s diary, which had failed to burn
properly in the data purge as the National Socialists prepared to surrender.
Postwar orthodox historians were all too eager to eke out the indicators of
malevolent intention from the personal writing of the propagandist.

Among them was the British historian of Britain
and Nazi Germany, Hugh Trevor-Roper. Trevor-Roper’s Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels (1945) was
rushed to print in the same year as Goebbels’ final entries. His reading of the
diary determined that Goebbels’ only talent was as a “mob orator and
manipulator,” and that despite the success of his films, all German propaganda
was “crude and violent in form, utterly unscrupulous in substance, and quite
indifferent to the truth.”[8] His book reproduced
portions of Goebbels’ diary that emphasized Goebbels’ bitterness towards others
and propensity for dishonesty, punctuated by personal anecdotes of
Trevor-Roper’s brief (and contentious) relationship with the Reich Minister.
Trevor-Roper’s work, while bias-laden and
typified by vitriolic language, was not out of place in orthodox historical
scholarship produced as the war came to an end. The more reserved Fay also
promulgated an unapologetic condemnation of Goebbels’ work. In his professional
opinion, the wholesale “lies and censorship” that the German propagandist had
produced necessitated the re-education of
German prisoners-of-war, although Fay refused to go so far as to advocate for
lessons on American democracy.[9] The debasement of WWII
German film productions and the insistence of scholars of this period that the
productions were solely malicious brainwashing eliminated opportunities for a critical
assessment of Goebbels’ films.

Social Historiography: Art and
the Audience

The collective sense of
conviction and righteousness would eventually abate, giving way to
self-reflection and doubt about the blind vilification of national opponents.
As pointed out by the American historian and foremost scholar of Eastern
European history, Wayne S. Vucinich, the uses of orthodox approaches to postwar
history threatened historical objectivity through inherent “dogmatism, […]
unilinear evolutionary theory, an exaggerated reliance on economic determinism,
and nationalistic coloring.”[10] Vucinich expressed
concerns that Post-war orthodox readings of propaganda would be utilized to
erase the past and muddy the record.[11] By the late 1960s,
historians veered away from emphasizing conflict origins as the focal point of
propaganda studies, seeking to divert the attention to a more critical
assessment of film as a complex vehicle for ideological dissemination. While
reactionary postwar historians had emphasized the dogmatic motivations of film
propagandists, writing their history with aggravated polarization, later
historiography needed a new approach.

Some of the first to take this challenge were
Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel. Manvell was a former first director of the
British Film Academy and propagandist turned scholarly author and film
historian by WWII’s end. Fraenkel was a Polish refugee of Jewish descent and
biographer of Nazi war criminals who had fled to Britain. Like Trevor-Roper,
Manvell and Fraenkel were both survivors of WWII, but their collaborative
approach to the war’s most hated propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, was very
different than that of their predecessor.

In their study, Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death (1960), Manvell and Fraenkel
also utilized Goebbels’s diary to examine the Reich Minster’s intentions behind
the creation of the Axis’s most notorious films. Their work covered the early
propagation of racist attitudes against the Jewish poor in The Eternal Jew (1940), to the lavish and desperate re-release of OhmKrüger
(1944), a narrative of counterfactual predictions for British defeat as
punishment for the island nation’s colonial past. Their reading highlighted
Goebbels’s approach to propaganda films as a tool to bring his people together
and design a patriotic national memory. The historians quoted Goebbels’s belief
that the Nationalist Socialist Party would, “infuse into art new impulses which
shall deepen public understanding of the greatness of time,” and “in the domain
of film the directive is the most important encouragement and stimulus to
creation.”[12]
The excerpts selected by Manvell and Fraenkel moderated the more extreme
characterizations of the propagandist as inherently depraved and portrayed a
man who was both infatuated with Hitler and his status in the Nazi party, but
also with film as an art form. By emphasizing the complexities of Goebbels’
human nature, attention was drawn away from Goebbels’ guilt as a source of war conflict and focused instead on
his cinematic influence.

By not seeking to determine blame, historians
like Manvell and Fraenkel unearthed anomalies in the film archive. In
particular, the historians claimed that the newsreel films Victory in the West (1941), Baptism
of Fire (1943), and The Eternal Jew
were some of the regime’s most poisonous.
Persistent antisemitism in the postwar period had resulted in minimal
historical inquest into Nazi films on the so-called “Jewish problem” outside of
the characterization of German propagandists as hateful and inhumane.[13] Manvell and Fraenkel,
however, reported that The Eternal Jew
was largely “a violent and […] obscene attack on the Jews.”

Their analysis also focused heavily on the
stylistic elements of Nazi propaganda. In particular, they argued that
cinematic cutaway shots and selective ordering of scenes were indicative of Goebbels’
skillful use of film to impart emotion and imagined narratives to an audience.[14] Manvell and Fraenkel critiqued
Baptism of Fire’s longshots of
continuous shelling on Warsaw buildings in which a narrator commented on the
hopelessness of Polish resistance, as well as the images of destruction,
buttressed with empowering crescendos of Wagnerian music, in both Baptism of Fire and Victory in the West. These two historians claimed that these films,
all produced early in the war, were the types that epitomized film propaganda
and the creators’ intentions to froth up the population in support of the war
effort.[15]

Against this familiar WWII
propaganda film backdrop, Manvell and Fraenkel then contrasted anomalies in the
historical record. Chief among these, Ohm Krüger and Kolberg (1945)
Goebbels made use of as a personal
creative outlet. The propagandist participated in the production of Ohm Krüger more than any other film
during his career. In the opening scene, as the film’s central character lays
dying, he tells his nurse, “One must be a dreamer to become a ruler.” Manvell
and Fraenkel’s research suggests that Goebbels had authored the line himself,
utilizing his access to the large-scale film production to participate actively in the craft.[16] On a more grandiose scale
than Ohm Krüger, Kolberg (1945) remained elusive to interpretation. While the
production met all the criteria of propaganda, the scale of creative
extravagance contained in it represented a break from Goebbels’s “total war” purpose-driven endeavors.[17] Ultimately, Manvell and
Fraenkel were unable to make a decisive statement about the film’s purpose, but
they expressed a certainty that the production represented a drive to create
more than a simplistic war narrative. Within these films, Manvell and Fraenkel
disagreed with previous Post-war orthodox historical writing that the Reich
Minister wielded propaganda at all points as a purely manipulative tool to assert
Aryan dominance in public life. Kolberg
especially would continue to raise questions for film historians in the
following decades, with each subsequent school of thought providing new
theories to their readings of it.

Scholarly investigation into WWII
propaganda films did not terminate at the German border. Prior to the 1960s,
American and British historians had a different relationship with Allied
propaganda films. Manvell, in his 1947 essay Twenty Years of British Film,
claimed that Allied filmmakers “faithfully” depicted the humble heroics of
combatants and were “only too conscious of the emotional implications and the
wider national significance of the stories they were representing.”[18] In contrast, Lewis Jacobs, a
former director and American film
historian, published his impressions on American WWII propaganda films in the Cinematic Journal in the 1960s. The
central subject of his article, “World War II and the American Film,” (1967)
was the immediate shift in the purpose of film production upon American entry
into the war. Before American engagement, popular feature film producers were
introducing subtle tonal shifts into their work, with the blessings of
President Roosevelt, to break the isolationist mindset of the interwar period.

Jacobs utilized the dramatic film, The Mortal Storm (1940), to tease out
the attitudes of filmmakers before Pearl
Harbor. The plot is focused on the plight
of a Jewish professor, Viktor Roth, in Germany. After refusing to retract a
publication that argued all human blood was the same,
his family faces subsequent destruction by the National Socialist Party.
This feature film was designed to serve as an early wake-up call for audiences,
well before the war was a popular one. Close-ups shots were a favorite tool of
the director, Frank Borzage, utilized to foreshadow death and to grant
spiritual significance to his characters.[19] The tight framing of
Roth’s face as he bids his wife farewell through the fencing of a concentration
camp humanized Jewish victims of Nazi violence for American audiences. It was
the first American film to take place within Germany since the war began, to
feature the terror tactics used on everyday citizens, and to call Hitler by
name. Public reactions to The Mortal
Storm represented the decisive influence of filmmakers’ storytelling and
the power of propaganda to reach American audiences.[20]

However, after
the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hollywood began producing intentionally
propagandistic films committed to “[total engagement] in the obligations and
demands of a government at war.”[21] Jacobs’ writing in the
1960s exemplified a shift in the scholarship of some American and British
historians away from the sanctification of American film propagandists. Instead
of the positive literary descriptions of American propaganda films and their
producers, which assuaged the Allied war guilt of post-war orthodox historians,
Jacobs’ article focused on the combat-oriented mindset of American WWII film
propagandists. Emotional and political manipulation began to be discussed as tactics of American film
propagandists and a substantial facet of the total war effort.

While films like The Mortal Storm succeeding in drumming up American approval, not
all pictures were as triumphant in inveigling public support. Mission to Moscow (1943), designed to
encourage fraternity between allies on the war
front, attempted to reverse popular attitudes towards Russia. The shots
and linguistic material were drafted from
factual historical data, including diary entries from the former American
Ambassador to Russia, Joseph E. Davies, and confidential reports from the U.S.
Department of State. Mimicking the stylization
of a documentary film, the picture intended to purify Stalin and his government
during the Moscow purge trials. The visual
likeness between the actors and the real individuals they depicted, including
Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, and Trotsky, determined the casting choices.

Jacobs criticized the liberties the filmmakers
took in blurring the lines of truth, presenting reproductions of genuine
historical documents alongside trial transcripts that the historian implied
were forgeries. The film portrayed Stalin
as dispensing judicial treatment on Trotsky, whose guilt is suggested through his conspiratorial
contacts with Germany and Japan. Americans reacted to this film with blustering
disdain, proclaiming, in the statement by John Haynes Holmes selected by
Jacobs, that “as history it is a lie, as propaganda it is a scandal of the first order.”[22] While Mission to Moscow was not received with blind acceptance, viewers
consumed many films without the same skepticism and historians would become
more interested in the dynamic between the screen and those that filled the
seats in the coming decade.

Historians in the 1970s,
interested in investigating cultural context and the significance of individual
human agency, became increasingly attentive to the relationship between the
audience and film. Largely influenced by E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1964), American historians
became profoundly invested in the daily life experiences of the lower social
classes.[23]
New sources of historical inquiry, in which cultural
behaviors formed collective identities, seemed to reveal the impetus
that drove the actions of individuals and thus history at large. The actions of
significant historical figures, according to these new social historians, were
driven by their responses to their respective societies.[24]
Thus, the social actions of average individuals who had experienced the
emotional appeals and ideologies woven into WWII era propaganda films now had
the potential, according to these historians, to have altered the direction of
history.

The social historians who came into the profession in the 70s were interested in the role of films as points of social gathering and shared ground. They also produced their revisionist interpretations of the historians of the 50s and 60s. These social historians, rather than concentrating solely on the roles of artistically skilled directors and writers, began studying how ordinary members of an audience consumed propaganda films. Historians in the 70s were often interested in people who were not particularly linguistically talented or even literate.[25] This reading of history presented a new way to explore propaganda films, wherein sound and images were used to reach average people without necessarily appealing to their intellects. Some, such as the film historian and coordinator of popular culture studies at Morgan State University, Thomas Cripps, emphasized the fact that these types of individuals were the intended audience of these productions.[26] Cripps argued that new approaches, utilizing social anthropological and cultural factors, were required to examine the significance of propaganda films to history.

Allan M. Winkler, still in the
early days of his historical career, responded to his call. In his first book, The
Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942-1945 (1978), Winkler commented on the
scholarship that had preceded him. He criticized interwar historians who,
aggravated by misguided isolationism, had
viewed the subject of propaganda after WWI “with a morbid fascination.”[27]
For their part, Winkler felt the postwar historians of the 1950s studied
propaganda films through a perspective inflamed by WWII’s democratic interventionism,
intended to counter the approaches of their predecessors. However, by the 1960s
scholars had begun to approach WWII propaganda films with greater detachment.
Winkler proposed that the academic community was
now in need of a new perspective from which to view their subjects, which he
hoped to offer through his research.

In Winkler’s study of the
Office of War Information (the American governmental body responsible for
overseeing the production of WWII-era propaganda films), he devoted a great
deal of attention to the cultural icon and playwright, Robert Sherwood. Winkler
began his study of Sherwood, and his interactions with the public, long before
Sherwood became a screenwriter of anti-Nazi films, such as in Escape in the Desert (1945), and before he
became the Overseas Director of the Office of
War Information (OWI) in 1943.[28]
By starting his study before Sherwood’s successes, Winkler could emphasize his
subject as an everyman. Indeed, Winkler
understood Sherwood’s approaches to propaganda to be representative of
how propaganda imparted certain ideas to average members of the audience.
Through Sherwood, Winkler discussed how average citizens interacted with
propaganda as a source of culture and how that interaction changed public
attitudes towards the war (evidenced by the plots of various plays and films he
wrote before and throughout the war). Winkler also made use of his subject to
criticize the post-war orthodox attitudes of the previous decades, through
references to the unflattering extremes Sherwood introduced to his plots under
the spell of orthodox determinism.[29]

Sherwood’s films were exemplary,
in many ways, of contemporary propaganda methods, but Winkler also placed them
in the wider context of a vastly expanded propaganda industry. In particular,
Winkler focused on the support offered to the American film industry by
President Roosevelt shortly after Pearl Harbor. In a public address, Roosevelt
encouraged the citizenry to engage with films as a source of both entertainment
and information, capable of providing a
clear understanding to the complexity of war, especially for those less
inclined to read newspapers.[30]
While they were only available to the general public later, soldiers watched
the infamous Why We Fight (1942-1945)
documentary series in training camps. These films reminded combatants of their
role as guardians for ordinary Americans and of their way of life. The imagery
and social associations evoked by the documentary series, Winkler asserted,
were the most important facet of the propaganda effort. He cited the work of
other social historians throughout his study, including Bill Maudlin, a former
editorial cartoonist during WWII, and Ernie Pyle, a journalist who had
emphasized the lived experiences of ordinary soldiers during combat. The
inclusion of Maudlin’s and Pyle’s research over the writing of other film
historians highlighted Winkler’s stress on a cultural reading of WWII
propaganda films and worked to strengthen his argument that images of home, not
ambiguous political subjects, were the most crucial aspects of the war propaganda.[31]

True to his study of the audience
and their perception of the American way of life, Winkler crossed racial
divides in the examination of his subjects. In a break from much of the
historical scholarship that preceded him, Winkler devoted space among his pages
for discussions of the ubiquitous xenophobic and racial stereotypes in the
propaganda films of WWII. Winkler wrote that the use of “guttural accents” and
canned phrases created two-dimensional images of the Axis military members and
political elite.[32] Written a decade after
the Civil Rights movement and in the wake of the Vietnam War, Winkler’s The
Politics of Propaganda was heavily influenced
by the social and political changes of his own time. Winkler also regularly
struck an apologetic note, however, in referencing the significance of
propagandists’ efforts to protect democracy. As a result, his writing described
the efforts of American producers of propaganda as occasionally misstepping into a sense of superiority, “an
unintended if perhaps unavoidable
consequence of war.”[33]

Winkler was
never so generous to Nazi propagandists in his book, but other social
historians of the 1970s found cultural causes for the stylization of German
WWII era propaganda. Jay W. Baird, perhaps the most
notable historian of German film propaganda, focused on the value of myth as
the fundamental facet of German propaganda production. “Myth was at the core of
National Socialism, but heretofore underplayed in studies on the propaganda of
the movement,” Baird claimed.[34]
He believed that the work of many early film historians could only aid as
surveys or introductory works on the topic of propaganda films due to their
determinist approaches. Instead, Baird merged his argument for Hitler’s rise to
power with historical revisionist thinking by identifying Hitler’s command of
German propaganda as an opportunist manipulation of German traditions and
cultural biases. Baird believed that Hitler attempted to use propaganda to effectively command the German people by
blending national cultural motifs with National Socialist ideology. More than
any other propagandist of the twentieth century, Baird argued, Hitler was able
to make domineering use of propaganda through the synthesis of symbolism and
traditional German mythology.

Indeed, Baird’s historical
scholarship regarded film as the most effective form of propaganda. Likewise,
social historians such as Baird argued that the power of film propaganda was
multiplied by the mass of public consumers and their ability to disseminate and
promote the nationalist agenda. The earliest National Socialist documentaries
and feature films could gain public support, and Hitler through them, because
they contrasted Jewish identity with the cultural ideal of Volksgemeinschaft (Germanic folk community). To make this point,
Baird cites The Eternal Jew, in which
the film emphasizes the Jewish involvement in trade
as “the antithesis of the cherished values and ideals of the German cultural
tradition.”[35] Members of a Polish
ghetto community were shown carrying goods as a narrator speaks over the
footage, describing the Jewish population as removed from the rural community
and unwilling to participate in combat, but quick to profit from the war effort
only an hour after Germany took Poland. Through vivid and manipulative
narration and imagery, the film depicted Jews as inhuman and separate from the
German nation.[36]

In addition to anti-Semitism,
Baird argued that feature-length propaganda films were particularly effective
and help to explain why German forces fought without surrender to their utter
destruction. “The apotheosis of the Nazis’ glorification of sacrificial death
came with the wartime feature films,” Baird wrote, referencing films such as Wunschkonzert (1940). The hero of the
film plays Bach from a church organ to encourage his comrades even as he is
aware that it will lead bombers to his location.[37]
The power of the film’s message was through the amalgamation of music, picture
(such as the aforementioned scene of the
hero’s concentrated back protracted over the organ while the church burns
around him), and familiar German cultural motifs. Wunschkonzert’s title was taken from the popular German Sunday
morning radio concert feature, “Wunschkonzert für die Wehrmacht,” and the film made use of much of the same music
requested on the station.[38]
Baird’s work on Wunschkonzert and his
research into German cultural significance within Nazi propaganda may have been
beyond the scope of many of his fellow cultural historians in the 1960s, but he
also returned to some of the favorite films of the previous schools of thought.

Like Manvell and Fraenkel
before him, Baird attempted to decipher the peculiar film, Kolberg. He spent less attention on the extravagant cost of the
film’s production, contesting that funds allocated to Kolberg were more indicative
of the Nazi Party’s determination to mythologize Hitler as a national cultural
icon. In contrast to Manvell and Fraenkel, Baird claimed that the production’s
extravagance spoke clearly to the Nazi’s weaponization of national identity
more than to the personal sentiments of any one person involved in its
creation.[39] Baird would return to Kolberg, in a later article, in which he
argued that the film’s power as propaganda was
predicated on its ability to conjure up memories of the historic defense
of the city of Kołoberg. Through the amalgamation of heroic memory, traditional
cultural motifs, and nationalistic language, the film was able to defend the
Party’s demand for total war. Nazi propaganda, Kolberg among them, would go down in history as some of the most
successful, because “Goebbels and his film artists and
technicians operated on the principle that the best propaganda neither
initiates new ideas nor belabors unnatural political and cultural themes.”[40] By reviving the familiar, the social historians argued, the film
propagandists were able to draw up wide public support for their aggressive war
agendas.

Postmodernism:
Critical Readings and Missing Narratives

While the work of social
historians in the 1970s did indicate that propaganda films altered public
perception in the war and thus resulted in behavioral and attitude changes, the
motivations and intentions of filmmakers and producers once again become the focus
of historians in the 1990s. However, unique to their school of thought, the
postmodern historians questioned assumptions about knowledge and truth in their
source materials. In his survey of recent historiography, Georg G. Iggers
described historians of the postmodern period as “always on the outlook for
forgery and falsification and thus operat[ing] with a notion of truth, however
complex and incomplete the road may [have been].”[41]
Through scriptwriting, the controlled use
of the camera’s lens, and editing, film
presented challenges to historical accuracy. Historians questioned both what was captured on film and its validity in
addition to what was not, and why propagandists made these choices. Now fifty
years after the end of the war, historians across the globe felt the need to
reexamine sources from the WWII period. The newfound skepticism of the
postmodern historians added a different level of complexity to the study of
WWII propaganda films than had been
investigated by historians in the past.

Doubt seems to be the impetus
for much of the work of the postmodern historians. Fresh from President Nixon’s
near impeachment, many historical scholars maintained an attitude of aggressive
skepticism. Postmodernists questioned the validity of all histories, including
those of noble WWII-era governments and their interactions with the public.
Sources seemed fraught with mischievous enigmas; written sources were marred by intentional and unintentional
bias, and images were capable of being manipulated or misrepresented. Many
postmodern intellectuals debated if any sort of understanding of the past was
ever possible.

Other postmodernists remained
somewhat more optimistic, such as George H. Roeder Jr., a liberal arts
historian of The School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Roeder encouraged
students of history to root out biases though an examination of historians
behind the research. “Context helps determine the meaning of all images,”
reminded Roeder, in the introduction to his book, The Censored War.[42]
Through his discussions of the economic benefits of American involvement in
WWII, Roeder challenged the more orthodox readings of American propaganda
films, which were hinged upon the ideals
of benevolent democracy. After combat ceased in 1945, the United States was
comfortably couched in global economic superiority as the world’s richest
nation, and Roeder suggested that the use of American propaganda films was
partially responsible. A post-war American memory of a just confrontation
against horrific enemies justified the gains. The span of the war had also been
just long enough to cure an economic depression, but not so long as to incur
massive public dissatisfaction. Rather than a convenient coincidence, Roeder
argued that propaganda during the war had been carefully utilized to maintain
conditions and to terminate with these results.[43] A
critical reading of the films that made use of gender and racial empowerment,
he argued, indicated less about social progress and suggested the fleeting nature of social gains in a controlled
propagandistic context.

While previous 1970s-era social
historians had fondly written on the roles of women in WWII propaganda films,
Roeder railed against the impressions as anachronistic representations of
feminism. “Viewers […] encountered frequent reminders that new opportunities
were only for the duration of the war,” Roeder argued. For example, patches
were sewn into the uniforms of female workers, delineating them from the male
colleagues, as temporary staff in what was still a male-dominated economic-social sphere.[44]
Posters, advertisements, and short cartoons that encouraged women to
participate in the war effort often did so by juxtaposing the work women could
do to domestic tasks. Audiences were to understand that the home was a woman’s
natural environment and the space that she would otherwise occupy during times
of peace. The movement of women from the domestic sphere to the public in mass
media was never intended to communicate a promise of gender equality.
Similarly, Roeder’s criticism of the supposed opportunities for social mobility
promised by WWII propaganda films extended to Americans disenfranchised based
upon their race.

The social historians of the
1970s had sought intimations in the WWII propaganda filmography that reflected
the progressive attitudes of the Civil Rights Movement, but the postmodern
historians of the 1990s argued that black Americans received even less lasting
empowerment than women. The roles made available to black Americans in
propaganda films of WWII had less to do with social equality, and more to do
with fueling the cost of war across the Atlantic. Away from the war front,
images of black employees working side-by-side with white Americans were
available for consumption, while images of other forms of social intermingling
across racial divides were censored.[45]
This demarcation suggested to postmodern historians that these working
opportunities were simply another cog in the war machine and would only survive
their immediate necessity. “The racial barriers became burdensome to leaders in
the private spheres trying to satisfy wartime needs,” Roeder explains, but the
inclusion of black labor in the war effort was a far cry from any public demand
for enforceable legal equality.[46]

It is arguable that film did
have some power to induce a public call to action, and Roeder took pains to
demonstrate the ways that the propaganda industry circumvented the agency it
gave to black characters. To demonstrate this argument, Roeder pulled from the
published statements of the OWI, which encouraged filmmakers to include black
American soldiers in crowd scenes or the
“occasional […] colored officer.”[47]
The inclusions of these characters was
intended to promote wartime unity and the conscription of black Americans to
the war effort, but the images that were
included were strictly controlled.
Roeder cited the work of the film historian Alan Woll, who studied the unique
cinematography in WWII propaganda films that included black characters. In
pictures such as Thousands Cheer and Ziegfeld Follies, filmmakers organized
the plot and shot scenes in a manner that would allow a theater to easily
remove the scenes with black characters if they chose to, without disrupting
the story, and it appeared this was often the case when these films were presented in southern movie theaters. [48]
Images that showed black people in authority positions were also minimalized, and
genuine documentary evidence of racial conflict from the war front was
censored back in the States.[49]
The ability to unify the public through black characters was not central to
propaganda films, according to a postmodern reading of the data.

Further dismantling the
national pride myth of propaganda, as had been extolled
by the post-war orthodox historians, Roeder was heavily critical of war industry
films. He argued that these films were less about national sentiment and more
about dismantling collective identities. He referenced Men of Fire (1944), which contrasted difficult combat conditions to
the carefree life of a sales clerk. Films such as these “sought to inspire
feelings of guilt.”[50] The Department of Treasury created documentaries that
contained images of dead or maimed soldiers from the war front for
factories that were experiencing labor problems. The films were played during
staff coffee breaks to prevent unionization and increase production. These same
films were then released to the public for consumption in the summer of 1945, a
choice that Roeder explained was designed to circumvent economic slowing in the
anticipated surrender of Germany. Propaganda films served not only to motivate
the public for ‘good or evil,’ depending
on one’s allegiance, as they had often been
interpreted in the past. Instead, the postmodern reading of WWII
propaganda films indicated that greed and social manipulation were clear
factors in film production within the United States.

On a divergent note from the
readings of Allied propaganda, some postmodernists rejected the 1970s-era
social historians’ claims that Axis propaganda could represent filmmakers’
inherent needs for artistic outlets. David Culbert, the historian of Nazi propaganda,
argued that previous readings of propaganda, like those of the post-war
orthodox historians, had oversimplified creators’
intentions and had focused their scholarship restrictively to the war effort.
In the chapter on the German film, Kolberg,
that Culbert published in World War II,
Film and History (1996), he criticized Baird’s interpretation of the film
as too naïve. Culbert believed Goebbels’s long and constant contact with the
film’s production was evidence of more than an unassuming validation of heroic
and sacrificial death.[51]
Instead, a postmodern interpretation of the film, according to Culbert,
signified the practical and political machinations of Goebbels. Baird’s misstep
was that he failed to consider the historical context around which Kolberg was made, for his cultural
reading of the data neglected to mention the fact that the city of Kołoberg had
already been decimated and was beyond saving by the time the film was released to the public. Culbert claimed
that the reasoning for this was hidden in
Goebbels’s diary.

Culbert argued that the
psychological importance of the city holding out had more to do with Goebbels’s
artistic sensibility. The propaganda he had created was greater than the
reality. Culbert insisted the film was held
back from release after production because Goebbels feared the soon-to-come
historical surrender would devalue his production by failing to match up to his
creation. Rather than being a tool of national fervor and troop support,
“Goebbels was more concerned that the dramaturgy of Kolberg be right than it find
civilian release in time to make sense as a propaganda vehicle.”[52]
In this instance, personal interests were thrust ahead of national political
objectives, indicating that what had long been
interpreted as film propaganda by historians may instead have been
better interpreted as a personal history of Goebbels himself.

Anomalies like Kolberg were as tempting to the
postmodernists as they were to their predecessors, but the historians of the
1990s were some of the first to question why certain gaps existed in propaganda
scholarship. Contrary to the popular expectations, documentary evidence of the
conditions in Holocaust internment camps had
remained largely undiscussed by film historians before the 1990s. The reason
for this, according to Roeder, was that very few of these films were made available to American audiences after
some of the first internment camps were
liberated. What could have been some of the most powerful imagery to
come out of the war, especially within the scope of the polarized age of
propaganda, was largely censored from the screen. Instead, political powers determined that the reality of cruelty
and horror would only alienate the public from continuing to attend war-time
film showings.[53] Producers of WWII
propaganda films considered it more valuable for viewers to consume images of
the war as entertainment, and that social control was more important to
filmmakers than truth. Roeder argued that previous historians had long ignored
this aspect in the historical film record and had largely neglected to mention
the lack of these films during the WWII era. By contrast, postmodern historians
adopted less constrained and definitive approaches, and were thus more inclined
to study the significance of the gaps and silences in the film propaganda data
pool.

Recent Analysis:
Pop Culture and Memory

Historians of the 21st century
continued to question the validity of the historical record as had the
postmodernists before them. With an
emphasis on popular culture and memory, contemporary historians have focused on
the thematic motifs and shared cultural elements that were a familiar part of
the film consumption in the 1940s.
Michael S. Shull and Dr. David Wilt, both of the Film Studies department
at George Washington University, published an examination of animated WWII
propaganda films in 2004. They argued that their work recognized a significant
subsection of WWII propaganda that had been overlooked by social historians of
the previous generations.[54] Despite
limited budgets and production time constraints, many of these short features,
which were a standard part of most theater entertainment from the 1930s to the
1960s, have provided concentrated nuggets of the era’s atmosphere. While the
animated shorts that typified the opening entertainment of feature films before
and during WWII were typically designed
for adolescent viewers, these cartoons often contained visual and verbal cues
that were specifically meant to communicate to the accompanying adult audience.

Seeking to communicate largely
to American audiences (as the U.S. produced the greatest amount of WWII
animation by far), characters like Walt Disney’s Donald Duck allowed audiences
to escape wartime woes with humor, which ultimately served to build up a
culture of confidence for the Allied forces. The feature productions of the
majority of WWII propaganda films were created
under the watchful gaze of the OWI, but the animated shorts that preceded these
films had remarkably more freedom. Despite the
opportunity to represent divergent attitudes, these shorts typically continued
to encourage the home front to participate in the war effort.

In the shorts Out of the Frying Pan Into the Firing Line
(1942), homemakers were encouraged to save their used cooking grease to
construct explosives. In Barney Bear’s
Victory Garden (1942), the central character crafts a caricature of
Hitler’s face in his backyard to bring in American bombers as assistants to his
plowing efforts. A direct hit loosens the soil
enough to begin planting. Cartoonists
after the attack on Pearl Harbor gleefully jumped on the opportunity to
criminalize the Japanese through racist depictions so derogatory that they
offended reviewers of the OWI.[55]
These shorts represented mid-war attitudes of the American public, already
incensed by years of polarized propaganda, on race. While the American social
landscape has never been free of racism, these derogatory racial depictions
encouraged ignorant fears and brought distrust of east Asian ethnic descendants
to the forefront of public consciousness.[56] Such
historical examples supported Shull’s and Wilt’s argument that WWII animated
films were significant to the study of popular
culture of the 1930s-1940s.[57]
The study of propaganda in its many forms, from animated shorts to documentaries,
has been increasingly interpreted as a valuable source of historical media and
mass communication scholarship over the last twenty years.

Ralph Donald, Chair
of the Mass Communications Department at Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville, has agreed that the study of American
propaganda films and popular culture are heavily intertwined. In his recent
publication of the history of American propaganda films, Hollywood Enlists (2017), Donald claimed that WWII represented a
significant age of American cultural imperialism. The ubiquity of Hollywood
entertainment had provided Americans with an attitude of themselves as the
norm. In contrast, Donald argued that scholars
of media studies have associated propaganda studies for far too long with
manipulation tactics and the corruption of totalitarian regimes. By emphasizing
propaganda as a vehicle of willful deceit and political exploitation, the
western consciousness of the term is typically associated with foreign powers
and divorced from domestic inquiry. Donald suggests instead that the world is
“inundated with a flood of intentional and unintentional messages about
American culture, thought, and values in the media products that America exports.”
This reframing of what activities and media fit within the umbrella of
propaganda has fostered new studies into the conquest of popular culture as
ideological colonization.[58]
Donald argued that more modern interpretations of propaganda, including
subversive and unintentional propaganda, provide new vehicles for the scholarly
interpretation of WWII films.

While political and religious
propaganda has existed for centuries, the birth of the motion picture industry
in the late 19th century set the stage for a world poised to use
propaganda in new ways by the 20th. Moreover,
while propaganda films were produced
during WWI and the interim-period, WWII has long been treated as propaganda
films’ adolescence. Despite this, Donald argues that these films were not so
immature and blunt as historians have treated them in the past. To emphasize his point, Donald argued that WWII
propagandists used a complicated technique, called cueing, to stimulate the emotional attitudes of viewers subtly.
By utilizing carefully chosen rhetoric, screenwriters
could call up sentiments of rage or grief already ingrained in the audience’s
cultural psyche. The phrase that was perhaps the most common of all the cueing
techniques used during WWII was “Remember Pearl Harbor.” The phrasing had been recycled from other American conflicts in
the past, especially instances in which Americans had a developed a sense of
righteous vengeance, such as “Remember
the Alamo” or “Remember the Maine.”
Donald uses The Fighting Seabees
(1944) to illustrate his argument, in which none of the characters directly
states, “Remember Pearl Harbor,” but the words are part of the opening musical
accompaniment. The portion of the
instrumental score in which these words were
said is reprised through several
dramatic scenes in the film.[59]

Paul Cohen, a scholar of
historical thought and American historiography, noticed something similar in
his reading of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V
(1944), which blurred the lines between high art, popular culture, and
propaganda. According to Cohen, propagandists of WWII were both highly skilled
in the production of their films, but also in the power of constructing
historical memory. In History and Popular
Memory (2014), Cohen references
some bold adaptations Olivier made to his version of the film. While
simultaneously drawing on elements from the historical record and Shakespeare’s
highly fictitious account of the same events, Olivier’s version depicts Henry V
as a kinder, more generous conqueror of France than he was in life or had been
portrayed in the theater. The
reason for the adjustments to the character, according to Cohen, was because at
the time of its release France was again occupied, but in this case by Nazi
Germany. These subtle changes guided the audience into celebrating their past
as a powerful empire without evoking direct connections to the Third Reich.[60] Contrary
to previous readings by historians of the 20th century, which
typically described propaganda films as glaringly biased and crude, contemporary
historians have argued that filmmakers in propaganda’s coming of age were already educated in the power of subtle
suggestion.

The study of WWII propaganda
films is still ongoing, and no historian covered in this essay can claim to be
the authoritative voice on how these films should be interpreted. While it is commonsensical to anticipate social and
political events would sway the attitudes of the public, this historiographical
study confirms that these events also influence the scholarly community’s ways of
studying the past. History is not static, and
the past is not set in stone. Interpreters of the past are constantly
renegotiating their relationship with memory and the passage of time. By
developing an understanding of how the academic community understands and
reinterprets the past, students of history can seek out new theories and perspectives to understand WWII propaganda
films without retracing the steps of their predecessors.
It may not be what Sidney B. Fay had in mind when he alluded to a future
of propaganda studies that would be “more just.”
Had he used the term as a synonym for “accurate,”
he may have been disappointed to see the results. Had he meant “fair,” then perhaps a myriad of interpretations is
as close as the world will ever get.

[18] Roger Manvell, “The British Film Feature
from 1940 to 1945,” in Twenty Years of British Film 1925-1945, ed.
Michael Balcon, Facsimile of 1947 ed, The Literature of Cinema, II (Stratford:
Ayer Company Publishers, 1972), 89.

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Essays in History

Established in 1954, Essays in History is the annual publication of the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. EiH publishes original, peer-reviewed articles in all fields of historical inquiry, as well as reviews of the most recent scholarship. EiH serves as a resource to students, teachers, researchers, and enthusiasts of historical studies.